"Each day in the
world 200 million children sleep in the streets. Not
one of them is Cuban." - -- Carlos Lege,
Cuban vice president.

11/07/07 "ICH' --- - Since
the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists
and capitalist true-believers around the world have been
relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of
life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the
perceived shortcomings of socialism. It's simply a system that
can't work, we are told, given the nature of human beings,
particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized,
consumer-oriented world.

In response to many of these criticisms, defenders of Cuban
society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian
sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 are largely
responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics.
The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given
by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system.
It would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point.
The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we'd
have to wait long enough for Cuban society to recover what it's
lost and demonstrate what its system can do when not under
constant attack by the most powerful nation in the world.

The sanctions (which Cuba calls an economic blockade), designed
to create discontent toward the government, have been expanding
under the Bush administration, both in number and in
vindictiveness. Washington has adopted sharper reprisals against
those who do business with Cuba or establish relations with the
country based on cultural or tourist exchanges; e.g., the US
Treasury has frozen the accounts in the United States of the
Netherlands Caribbean Bank because it has an office in Cuba, and
banned US firms and individuals from having any dealings with
the Dutch bank.

The US Treasury Department fined the Alliance of Baptists
$34,000, charging that certain of its members and parishioners
of other churches had engaged in tourism during a visit to Cuba
for religious purposes; i.e., they had spent money there. (As
George W. once said: "U.S. law forbids Americans to travel to
Cuba for pleasure.")

American courts and government agencies have helped US companies
expropriate the famous Cuban cigar brand name 'Cohiba' and the
well-known rum "Havana Club".

The Bush administration sent a note to American Internet service
providers telling them not to deal with six specified countries,
including Cuba. This is one of several actions by Washington
over the years to restrict Internet availability in Cuba; yet
Cuba's critics claim that problems with the Internet in Cuba are
due to government suppression.

Cubans in the United States are limited to how much money they
can send to their families in Cuba, a limit that Washington
imposes only on Cubans and on no other nationals. Not even
during the worst moments of the Cold War was there a general
limit to the amount of money that people in the US could send to
relatives living in the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1
billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life
during the first forty years of this aggression. The suit held
Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the
wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the eight years
since, these figures have of course all increased. The
sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, makes acquiring
many kinds of products and services from around the world much
more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they
are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or
industry; or they mean that Americans and Cubans can't attend
professional conferences in each other's country.

The above is but a small sample of the excruciating pain
inflicted by the United States upon the body, soul and economy
of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of
labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We don't hear much of
that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote at the
United Nations on a General Assembly resolution to end the US
embargo against Cuba. This is how the vote has gone:

Yes-No
1992 59-2 (US, Israel)

1993 88-4 (US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay)

1994 101-2 (US, Israel)

1995 117-3 (US, Israel, Uzbekistan)

1996 138-3 (US, Israel, Uzbekistan)

1997 143-3 (US, Israel, Uzbekistan)

1998 157-2 (US, Israel)

1999 155-2 (US, Israel)

2000 167-3 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands)

2001 167-3 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands)

2002 173-3 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands)

2003 179-3 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands)

2004 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau)

2005 182-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau)

2006 183-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau)

2007 184-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau)

Cuba's sin, which the United States of America can not forgive,
is to have created a society that can serve as a successful
example of an alternative to the capitalist model, and,
moreover, to have done so under the very nose of the United
States. And despite all the hardships imposed on it by
Washington, Cuba has indeed inspired countless peoples and
governments all over the world.

A long-time writer about Cuba, Karen Lee Wald, has observed:
"The United States has more pens, pencils, candy, aspirin, etc.
than most Cubans have. They, on the other hand, have better
access to health services, education, sports, culture,
childcare, services for the elderly, pride and dignity than most
of us have within reach."

In a 1996 address to the General Assembly, Cuba's vice
president, Carlos Lage stated: "Each day in the world 200
million children sleep in the streets. Not one of them is
Cuban."

On April 6, 1960, L.D. Mallory, a US State Department senior
official, wrote in an internal memorandum: "The majority of
Cubans support Castro ... the only foreseeable means of
alienating internal support is through disenchantment and
disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. ...
every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the
economic life of Cuba." Mallory proposed "a line of action that
makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to
Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about
hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government." Later
that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the embargo.

Hugo the demon dictator strikes again

The latest evidence that Hugo Chavez is a dictator, we are told,
is that he's pushing for a constitutional amendment to remove
term limits from the presidency. It's the most contentious
provision in his new reform package which has recently been
approved by the Venezuelan congress and awaits a public
referendum on December 2. The lawmakers traveled nationwide to
discuss the proposals with community groups at more than 9,000
public events, rather odd behavior for a dictatorship, as is
another of the reforms -- setting a maximum six-hour workday so
workers would have sufficient time for "personal development."

The American media and the opposition in Venezuela make it sound
as if Chavez is going to be guaranteed office for as long as he
wants. What they fail to emphasize, if they mention it at all,
is that there's nothing at all automatic about the process --
Chavez will have to be elected each time. Neither are we
enlightened that it's not unusual for a nation to not have a
term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the
United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the
world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have
a term limit on the office of the president during the nation's
first 175 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in
1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

Is it of any significance, I wonder, that the two countries of
the Western Hemisphere whose governments the United States would
most like to overthrow -- Venezuela and Cuba -- have the
greatest national obsession with baseball outside of the United
States?

In a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. Last month,
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told assembled world
leaders at the United Nations that the time had come to take
action against Iran. "None disagrees," she said, "that Iran
denies the Holocaust and speaks openly of its desire to wipe a
member state - mine - off the map. And none disagrees that, in
violation of Security Council resolutions, it is actively
pursuing the means to achieve this end. Too many see the danger
but walk idly by - hoping that someone else will take care of
it. ... It is time for the United Nations, and the states of the
world, to live up to their promise of never again. To say enough
is enough, to act now and to defend their basic values."

Yet, later the same month, we are informed by Haaretz,
(frequently described as "the New York Times of Israel"), that
the same Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had said a few months
earlier, in a series of closed discussions, that in her opinion
"Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to
Israel." Haaretz reported that "Livni also criticized the
exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is
making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is
attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most
basic fears."

What are we to make of such a self-contradiction, such perfect
hypocrisy?

And here is Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International,
writing in his own publication: "The one time we seriously
negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in
Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the
country. Bush's representative to the Bonn conference, James
Dobbins, says that 'the Iranians were very professional,
straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical
to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance [Afghan
foes of the Taliban] to make the final concessions that we asked
for.' Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better
relations with the United States through him and others in 2001
and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech,
he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins
took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to
have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, he says, 'looked down and rustled his papers.'
No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They're
mad."

Dobbins has further written, in the Washington Post: "The
original version of the Bonn agreement ... neglected to mention
either democracy or the war on terrorism. It was the Iranian
representative who spotted these omissions and successfully
urged that the newly emerging Afghan government be required to
commit to both. Only weeks after Hamid Karzai was sworn in as
interim leader in Afghanistan, President Bush listed Iran among
the 'axis of evil' -- surprising payback for Tehran's help in
Bonn. A year later, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, all
bilateral contacts with Tehran were suspended. Since then,
confrontation over Iran's nuclear program has intensified."

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran made another
approach to Washington, via the Swiss ambassador who sent a fax
to the State Department. The Washington Post described it as "a
proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States,
and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including
full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and
the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant
groups." The Bush administration "belittled the initiative.
Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who
had sent the fax." Richard Haass, head of policy planning at the
State Department at the time and now president of the Council on
Foreign Relations, said in the Post the Iranian approach was
swiftly rejected because in the administration "the bias was
toward a policy of regime change."

So there we have it. The Israelis know it, the Americans know
it. Iran is not any kind of military threat. Before the invasion
of Iraq I posed the question in this report: What possible
reason would Saddam Hussein have for attacking the United States
or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national
suicide? He had no reason, and neither do the Iranians. Of the
many lies surrounding the invasion of Iraq, the biggest one of
all is that if, in fact, Saddam Hussein had those weapons of
mass destruction the invasion would have been justified.

The United States and Israel have long striven to dominate the
Middle East, viewing Iraq and Iran as the most powerful barriers
to that ambition. Iraq is now a basket case. Iran awaits
basketization. And, eventually perhaps, the omnipresent American
military bases will close the base-gap between Iraq and
Afghanistan in Washington's encirclement of China, the better to
monitor the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea
areas.

There was a time when I presumed that the sole purpose of United
States hostile policy toward Iran was to keep the Iranians from
acquiring nuclear weapons, which would deprive the US and Israel
of their mideast monopoly and ultimate tool of intimidation. But
now it appears that destroying Iran's military capability,
nuclear and otherwise, smashing it to the point of being useless
defensively or offensively, is the Bush administration's
objective, perhaps along with the hope of some form of regime
change. The Empire leaves as little to chance as possible.

Reason Number 3,467 for having doubts about our God-given
free-enterprise system

I recently bought my first cellphone and took it with me to
Burlington, Vermont, only to discover that it didn't work there.
It seems that AT&T/Cingular doesn't have cellphone towers in
that area. But other phone companies do have towers there and
their subscribers' phones work. Is that not a really clever
system? To have a single national telephone system with all
towers available for use by everyone would presumably upset
libertarians and others who worship at the shrine of
competition.. So instead we're given another charming "market
solution", and the beauty of competition is preserved. Why stop
there? Just imagine the advantages in being able to call around
to find out which fire station will give you the best rate
should your house suddenly go up in flames.

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